Long-term, we expect to expand distribution of the Web Media Extension package to all Windows 10 devices so that these formats become a trusted and reliable part of the web platform available to developers.

Oh great! I wasn't sure if Microsoft was going to do this. They are even planning to support Vorbis. This is exciting! With the latest improvements in HTML5 support in Edge over the last week, it looks like Microsoft may actually be serious about competing at the level of Chrome and Firefox.

@Jay Tuckey: They are doing exactly that:
Opus support reads "Roadmap priority: High — We intend to begin development soon", while
Vorbis support reads "Roadmap priority: Medium — Development is likely for a future release."

It says low priority and no development. ".opus" is opus-in-ogg. What's the plan here? "WebM Audio" (which I've never encountered "in the wild" except for a single test file I made myself)?

(Personally, I *much* prefer ogg's more flexible and simple metadata - webm has the same "70 or so special little differently formatted binary fields" limitation going on that mp3's "IDv2" does. I think .ogg is hypothetically better for streaming, too, but I'm not certain about that.)

Well done. But more importantly: we need .WAV support too - .wav is a Microsoft/IBM format after all! Although not compressed, it is what our external hardware requires us to manage. To have this supported by most browsers but not supported by Microsoft IE is frustrating and incomprehensible.

Perhaps intended to prop up/force use of Microsoft Media Player, which is poorly integrated & therefore impractical for us to support for external customers.

@The Only: Thank you for voting, and please pass word around so that more people vote for this too! In addition to Opus being royalty free, it is also the most efficient and versatile audio codec available right now. The difference in audio quality between Opus versus MP3 or AAC is huge with some audio samples (particularly nature sounds), it does a terrific job with speech, and it has very low generational losses. Opus also supports live streaming directly through a web browser, which is great for online radio streaming.

It is about time we had a cross-browser audio format. Any future sites I create will use OGG/Vorbis, Opus, or another freely created open source file format. In fact the current site I am working on will never support legacy MP3 audio files nor will any in the future unless threats are involved. I will discourage any company from paying the vig. AAC is OK. However, AAC format will still require charges to sell encoders/decoders - http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/aac-faq.aspx# which is better than MP3 but not great. For example, ffmpeg couldn't distribute with it so it could only be provided in source code format... LAME all over again). When I found out people couldn't use the LAME MP3 encoder or decode MP3 to without getting sued by Thompson, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (FhG), or whoever I was disappointed. If the user wishes to convert files to an older MP3 format for legacy MP3 players. Feel free... There are hundreds of programs to do this for personal use.

At the time of this post Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and some newer Microsoft products already have support for Opus (OGG). OGG/Vorbis is another that is gaining steam. Plus Opus is now an accepted standard. So, the groundwork is set. Likely you are a techie like ourselves and would like to know that there is at least something you can use if you want to work with audio on the internet without digging through the internet and license agreements for working/licensed encoders. Opus could be that format. Please give us some option. Join with the other internet giants and support OGG format.

Even skipping support for vorbis files in favor of .opus-only would be sufficiently useful to be great. I much prefer them as .opus, but opus in "webm audio" files would be okay. (Support for both would be best, but .opus would make me happy!)

It is irritating that there is not one format that can safely be used across all platforms in <audio> tags, especially when Ogg Vorbis already provides similar and often superior efficiency to patent-encumbered standards such as MP3. This is incredibly important sooner rather than later - it will already be a long time until such a change would spread far enough to matter.

It should be noted that .ogg [vorbis] and .opus (opus audio in a .ogg container) is MUCH more widespread than most people realize (due to not having any organized promotion or marketing). ALL Android devices have had native support for Ogg Vorbis from the beginning. .opus support is now native in Android "L" as well, making up a huge chunk of mobile market support for ogg vorbis and likely .opus going forward. A wide variety of media player software has .opus support built in now too (and has had ogg vorbis support for a long time).

(Anyway - the point is merely that ogg vorbis and opus are not ONLY "very popular in the Linux world" but elsewhere as well!)

MS adding .opus and/or .ogg [vorbis] <audio> tag support to IE would remove MY last objection to IE at least, AND give essentially everybody who isn't using "Apple Safari" (totalling >90% of web browsers, last time I checked) a common high-quality audio format that everybody can legally use on the web. Please do!

ObjectRTC is a good start, but IE really needs <audio> tag support. Support in WMP/DirectShow would be ideal as well, of course...

Also, I'm with Techie007 below - if I could put all 25 of my votes towards this, I would. I, too, have switched to .opus for the last few years for non-lossless uses, and I don't ever want to give it up.
I'd love to be able to share with IE users.

3 votes for this excellent suggestion! I would like to put all 25 of my votes towards this, Opus is so good. I have been using this audio format a lot for several years now due to its superb audio quality, and recently found out that I have over 2000 Opus audio files totaling over 10 GB on my computer.

Microsoft, let me be specific: This is a request for Internet Explorer <AUDIO> tag support for Opus and Vorbis. While you're at it, please add support for Opus and Vorbis to Windows as well, so WMP and DirectShow based players can play these files too. And don't forget to add an MCI extension in the registry so that legacy MCI players can piggyback onto the DirectShow decoder.

Other Opus suggestions (each is on a separate suggestion forum, so you have a fresh set of votes):

Note that we use Ogg Vorbis extensively for audio samples and pronunciation examples on Wikipedia. Currently in desktop IE we require users to install codecs manually to make these work, and on Windows RT and Windows Phone there's no solution at all.

I've been working on a JavaScript shim for this -- http://ogvjs-testing.wmflabs.org -- but native support in <audio> & <video> without manual codec installation would perform better and make us very happy. (Also still waiting on Web Audio to land so I can drop the Flash shims for IE, and make it work in Windows Phone which has no Flash.)